While the Navy"s transition from stove-piped systems to a net-centric world built around service oriented architecture (SOA) benefits the warfighter in achieving information dominance, it complicates software development and testing because of the substantial infrastructure involved, making it difficult to assemble a prototyping environment. We propose to create such an Advanced Prototyping Environment (APE) based on open source components that, given a specification of required items, dynamically instantiates virtual machines to provide just the services and components needed to develop and test mission critical services, components, and complete environments (SCEs). Access is controlled via digitally-signed certificates, which determine users"access to resources and SCE trust-level. Developers of new SCEs can use APE to instantiate a stand-alone sandbox on their own hardware, which provides mocked up data behind real service interfaces, providing confidence that code developed will port directly to real services. Owners of finished SCEs can use the bundled APE software/hardware to perform tests with real service interfaces. APE supports multiple groups that are testing different SCEs on its blade servers through hardware virtualization, which is a prelude to deploying SCEs to the Fleet. APE can run in a lab or even be carried onto ships for testing at sea.